


How does your garden grow?

by silver_penny



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Episode Tag, Episode: s12e03 The Foundry, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Motherhood, Time Skips, both in the fic and in Mary's life, but since when do we get what we deserve?, every time Mary looks at Dean she just sees John, he doesn't deserve that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:48:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28415634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silver_penny/pseuds/silver_penny
Summary: She’s standing here, and it’s been thirty years – more than thirty years – and her children are grown-ups and strangers, and she can’t see their need past her own grief. All that’s left to bind them is the tenuous connection of her own motherhood, and she doesn’t know now if she has ever known what to do with that.Moments in the life of Mary Winchester, through 12x01, 12x02, and 12x03.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Mary Winchester & Sam Winchester
Kudos: 10





	How does your garden grow?

She’s sitting here and he tells her it’s been thirty years – more than thirty years – and her children are grown-ups and strangers, and she can’t see their needs past her own grief. She can’t see their selves at all, and it’s so much, it’s losing a whole home and a husband and their childhoods and a life and a life-long dream all in one go, all in three minutes, stepping into little Sammy’s bedroom to check on her child, the pain the horror the pain, and opening her eyes to grass and trees and the air clear of smoke and a stranger staring across at her with a world of fear and hope in his eyes.

She goes with him and she tries, she does really try, to put past things aside and move on. She spends all night up with John’s journal, hearing his voice behind her, feeling his presence at her shoulder – in the metaphorical and not in the literal sense. Her grief is pierced through with horror and frustration as she watches him push deeper and deeper into the shadows, as she watches him learn everything she knows, everything she hides – hid – from him, everything she’d tried so hard to forget. _Why?_ she wants to scream. _Why did you do this by yourself? Why did you start over?_ There is no mention of her maiden name, no aid or support from her childhood friends and mentors. There’s just Dean, back in Sammy’s crib after all the work they’d done coaxing him into his own bed after nightmares, there’s Sammy’s first steps that she’s missed, their first days of kindergarten, Sammy’s high school graduation. There are no pictures. She’s left to extrapolate their lives herself, to trace somehow the broken line between the children she remembers and the full-grown adults that hover, awkward and earnest, in the library doorway when they find her the next morning. She tells herself again to try – or at least to try to try. Dean goes off to make them coffees – her boys drink _coffee_ – and Sammy comes around the table to sit across from her.

It’s a little easier, with Sammy. It hurts more, but the pain is hard and clear and well-defined, and she can set it aside while he’s standing in front of her, trying and failing to tamp down on his wonder and his curiosity. She never knew Sam, never knew him as his own person, never knew a Sam that could do more than sleep and eat and wail. This person in front of her is entirely new, and it’s easier to take him as he is, as the realization of all the potential she’d held in his infant form, and try to get to know him. She is learning him for the first time, so she starts with all the questions she’d wanted to ask back when he couldn’t speak at all. What’s your favourite colour? What’s your favourite song? What do you like to eat, what are you afraid of, what subjects did you like in school? Sam is – so worried, but spills these things easily, can tell long winding stories of his college girlfriend and his favourite books and long road trip games in the Impala with his brother. She can see the torn corners of his words where he’s amending long stretches of empty time and skipped-over story, but she lets them pass; she’s holding back too. With Sammy she missed his whole life, his whole childhood, and the pain of that is so complete that she knows exactly what to do with it. She can set it aside and see that her son doesn’t need his mother; he has grown up without a place for her in his life. He doesn’t know what to do with a mother once he has one, and this is good, because she doesn’t know what to do with him either.

Dean comes in and slides some mugs across the table. They’re mismatched and chipped and she remembers with another stab of loss the identically cast set of porcelain dishes she’d so carefully lined up in her new cabinets, stepping back to admire the apple-pie perfection of it all and the chance to build something going forward that was hopeful and new.

Dean is harder, Dean is a lot harder, because she remembers him clearly and precisely, in his defined likes and dislikes and childish petulance and wide-eyed excitement and somber sincerity. She is looking for him in her memories and he is looking for her in his own. _I’m right here_ , she wants to scream. _I’m here, Dean, it’s your mother, it’s your mother and I’m here._ But she wonders, when she thinks too long on it, what her fumbling, hopeful attempts at motherhood looked like through the eyes of her 37-year-old son. She was not prepared for this, this judgement and this confrontation. They’ve been stripped of every dynamic upon which their relationship was built: on the gaps of age, on the years of experience, on gulfs of physical size and strength and maturity and intelligence. She doesn’t know how to face her son as an equal. All that’s left to bind them is the tenuous connection of her own motherhood, and she doesn’t know now if she has ever known what to do with that.

She drinks her coffee.

The questions she wants to ask Dean are bigger, and she doesn’t think she can get them out here, in the library, over his chipped mugs. She wants to ask him hunter questions, and to ask him about John. She wants to know the point at which her bright, empathetic son broke into the man across from her, sitting with his back to the wall in his own home, and she wants to know if she’s strong enough to weather the answer. When she thinks of him, she sees his four-year-old self, climbing over the chair to reach up to her; when she looks at him, she can see only John: John in the set of his mouth and the slope of his shoulders, in his pace across the floor and the steadiness of his hands. So she can’t talk to him and she can’t look at him. She catches Sam’s eye and asks an anodyne question in order to break the silence. He looks so utterly relieved when he answers.

Ultimately, she can’t get the words out to Dean, and her patchwork effort with Sam only skates the surface of everything they’ve lost between them. She’s drowning every day in the force of a loss that’s unwarranted, and she doesn’t have anything to hang on to anymore. Even the monsters are different, and the guns don’t click like they used to when she was a child, like her father had always promised they would. She’s drowning, and in a moment of clarity she realizes that this is a place she’s been before; this is a fight she’s fought before. She finishes her coffee and gathers up her things.

“I’m leaving,” she tells her children. She holds Sammy in her arms one more time, the only thing she knows how to do for him; she looks at Dean, really looks at him, begging him to see her, trying to find him. This time, it’s Dean who won’t look up.

He can’t look at her.

**Author's Note:**

> I spent these episodes incredibly frustrated with Mary; this is an attempt to extend some empathy her way and explore her perspective. It's almost unreliable narrator territory, which was interesting, as there's a lot she just doesn't know yet. All concrit welcome.


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